Hand-held portable WWW access terminal with visual display panel and GUI-based WWW browser program integrated with bar code symbol reader

Abstract

A portable hand-held WWW access terminal for accessing HTML-encoded documents located on the WWW. The terminal includes a bar code symbol reader in a hand-supportable housing for reading URL-encoded symbols specifying the location of HTML-encoded documents stored in information servers connected to the Internet and supporting the TCP / IP standard. A computing platform is provided for supporting a GUI-based WWW browser program integrated with the bar code symbol reader in the hand-supportable housing. A telecommunication modem is operably connected to the computing platform in order to establish a two-way telecommunication link between the GUI-based WWW browser and an Internet service provider (ISP) connected to the Internet. In response to reading a URL-encoded bar code symbol, the WWW browser program automatically accesses a corresponding HTML-encoded document on the Internet, for display on a visual display panel integrated with hand-supportable housing. A keypad is also integrated with the hand-supportable housing for manually providing information to the WWW browser program.

Description

BACKGROUND OF INVENTION1. Field of InventionThe present invention is directed to a novel Internet scanning terminal and a novel method for surfing Internet World Wide Web (WWW) using bar code symbols encoded with the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) indicating the location of Web-Sites within the WWW to be explored.2. Background of the InventionPresently, several techniques have been developed for connecting to (i.e., "surfing" among) Internet Web-sites using a conventional graphical user interface (GUI) based Internet browser programs, such as the Navigator.RTM. from Netscape Communications, Inc. or the Internet Explorer.RTM. from Microsoft, Inc. Notably the availability of any particular Web-site surfing technique depends, of course, on where the Internet user finds him or her self in the Internet browser program at any particular instant of time.For example, if one is currently at a Web-site (i.e., in a particular HyperText Markup Language (HTML) document), at which there is a hi...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

Accordingly, it is a primary object of the present invention to provide an improved system and method of surfing Web-sites on the Internet while avoiding the shortcomings and drawbacks of prior art systems and methodologies.

A further object of the present invention is to provide such an Internet Scanning System, wherein the URL-encoded bar code symbol printed on various types of print media is a URL-encoded truncated-type bar code symbol, having a very low height to length ratio, thereby allowing many URL-encoded bar code symbols to be printed on a single sheet or page of a Web-site guide, along with their corresponding human-readable URLs and content descriptions.

Another object of the present invention is to provide a novel method of surfing to Web-sites on the Internet by scanning URL-encoded bar code symbols into GUI-based web browser programs, without the need of manual data entry operations or the like.

Another object of the present invention is to provide a novel method of surfing to Web-sites on the Internet by optically scanning the character strings of URLs into GUI-based web browser programs, without the need of manual data entry operations and the like.

Problems solved by technology

In addition to being time consuming, this Web-site surfing technique is prone to errors, causing the browser program to connect to the wrong Web-site or return a message stating that the Domain Name of the Web-site sought after cannot be found.

From practical point of view, this is quite frustrating to the Internet user.

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